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Coconut Conundrum

The American Heart Association Presidential Advisory Board recently published a new scientific review and recommendations for dietary fat intake, including a recommendation against the consumption of coconut oil. This has lead to a flurry of newspaper articles with headlines such as “Coconut oil worse for you than butter and beef dripping” (The Independent).

I agree that most oils of any kind on the market are highly processed and therefore oxidized and unhealthy compared to oils the way they were produced hundred of years ago (and still are in traditional environments). So I agree that oil is in general reduces health unless of the artisanal type consumed in Mediterranean villages with no supermarkets in sight, or from small local olive farms purchased at your local Farmer’s market. HOWEVER, the AHA is not taking into account all of the evidence when concluding that replacing animal fats with vegetable oils increases health. In fact, there is significant evidence going back half a century that the opposite is true.

Eggs were recently taken off of the “bad food list” by the US Government as reported by the same newspapers in 2015: “Cholesterol U-turn as research shows fatty foods might not be bad for us after all” (this example again from The Independent).

Part of the problem of this discussion is its combining three separate issues into one debate. First, overeating in general accelerates aging and disease risk to some extent, no matter how healthy the food, which makes the over-consumption of fats (happens easily when eating oils) an issue. Second, processed carbs reduce health even when consumed in relatively small amounts, so replacing them with fats or anything else is a good idea, making fats (by comparison) “healthy.” Third, most oils on the modern market are oxidized and therefore unhealthy, so any food is healthier than its extracted oil.

Since coconut oil is the highest in saturated fats of any oil, butter, animal fat or other plant fat, it is the most resistant to oxidation and therefore the best for cooking, particularly at high temperature such as stir frying, etc. This does NOT mean that coconut fat is “healthy” but that it is not hurting you as much as other oils exposed to high temperature. This is like saying riding a motorcycle is not healthy but having a helmet on at least reduces how much you might get hurt.

Totally separate from this issue is whether raw, fresh coconut (the food, not the oil squeezed out of it) is healthy. Several years ago I did a literature search on health effects of coconut potentially relevant to human health and could not find any evidence for a negative health outcome in spite of increasing blood cholesterol levels (see below references). This argues for blood cholesterol levels being correlated to disease (if oxidized, such when you eat processed oil, smoke, or avoid fats altogether), but argues against blood cholesterol levels causing disease.

The bottom line: eat natural food. If you eat something processed such as olive oil or milk, get the least-processed version such as the locally produced artisanal oil or the cream top milk (with a bit of pasteurization to avoid food poisoning but nothing more, which oxidizes the fats in the milk). If you cannot afford higher-quality fats, focus your diet on vegetables with protein instead of large amounts of fats. And if you want to cook with fat, use a bit of butter or (even better) some coconut, preferably ground up coconut as opposed to just the oil. Or, even more preferably, don’t cook with fat at all; I use a bit of water or a watery vegetable (e.g. tomato) and cook at low heat, and then add patience and take my time so nothing gets burned. Eating like your Great-Grandparents did really just takes a bit of common sense in the end.

The complexity and back-and-forth on these nutrition topics stems from the loss in health value with any form of food processing, which has reached caricature levels in modern society where soda is consumed like water and fast food is considered food. Coconut has become yet another victim of that contrived modern complexity.

Coconut is in fact i.e. based on evidence, healthy:

“Effects of dietary fatty acids and carbohydrates on the ratio of serum total to HDL cholesterol and on serum lipids and apolipoproteins: a meta-analysis of 60 controlled trials”, Mensink RP et al., Am J Clin Nutr 77 2003 1146